In this delightful satire of the "gig economy" and its technofile absurdities, Alexandre, an unemployed father with two young children takes a position at a youth-oriented startup called "The Box" where anything goes except for parenting. With the help of the savvy Arcimbaldo, Alexandre manages to conceal his children while playing up his supposed connection to local officials. His boss Séverine is a haughty go-getter who spews out an endless stream of franglais while losing control of her driver-less car. Drones falling to the sidewalk, quirky Zoom calls, zany gags such as Arcimbaldo agreeing to acts as a stand-in protestor, Uber drivers falling asleep - the film is a feast of comic send-ups. Perhaps with a nod to wacky french comedy - Tati, Louis Funes - Podalydès has crafted an hilarious contemporary satire that takes on the strange consequences of the post-industrial economy.
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josephblonde18 February 2022
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ulicknormanowen18 May 2022The Podalydès bros are one of the treasures of the contemporary French cinema whatever they film , Gaston Leroux or Becassine or ....you name it.... And besides they love Hergé and Tintin.
"Mon oncle" (1958) transposed to the hard realities of the twenty-first century ;Alexandre is a new Monsieur Hulot lost in the modern world ;both Podalydès 's film and Tati's come to the same conclusion ,some sixty years after.
Alexandre is lost in a dehumanized world , a computerized life where Big brother ,even if he does not appear ,is present everywhere ; a world full of English name -dropping , connected watches which never leave you alone ; when he eventually finds a job, he does not even know what they expect from him ; the language becomes computerese, a jargon Alexandre pretends to understand , it seems the work deals with drones .
His partner (in French ,they borrow the equivalent from maths :binôme -binomial- ,a hip word ) has a no-driver car ,with speech recognition ( the failed face recognition scene is worth the price of admission alone!) , which even sends her owner messages on her connected watch :"I 'm going to the next charging station "; in this state-of-the -art vehicle , Jean Ferrat 's magnificent song ,"la montagne", becomes a wonderful anachronism ......
But there's a fly in the oinment. If you want to work in this attractive firm, where the staff almost acts like robots ,there's a golden rule: you're not allowed to have children ! And Alexandre ,whose wife has joined the Navy , has to take care of his two toddlers.
Enter Arcimbaldo : he has plenty of jobs ,one of them consisting of replacing protesters in demonstrations : another sign of the time :Human beings are turned into robots indeed. Arcimboldo will play the role of the daddy .
A wonderful satire ,with plenty of gags,puns , and a revenge against a society that denies human relationships.